Why join the course?

On this free online course, we’ll look at three types of maths puzzle, exploring their history, meeting the puzzlists who created them, and studying and practising problem-solving techniques.

Each week, we’ll tackle a different type of encrypted maths puzzle, including:

Cryptarithms: maths puzzles where the digits have been replaced by letters. You’ll need to practice your verbal arithmetic and use addition, subtraction, multiplication and division to solve them.

Symbologies: maths puzzles where numbers are represented by symbols. We’ll explore everything from ancient Egyptian, Roman and Greek numerals to the language of computers to ISBN and bar codes.

Mathematical operator puzzles: maths puzzles where the numbers are given, but the mathematical operator is missing. For example, what operation does the asterisk stand for in *1320=6?

By the end of the course, you’ll have upgraded your problem-solving skills, gained knowledge and insight into the history, art and methodology of deciphering encrypted puzzles, and exercised your brain with fun challenges.

0:24Skip to 0 minutes and 24 seconds A mathematician is a gate opener He provides the key To all the other natural sciences and beyond Hello, I’m Dr. Yossi Elran and I would like to invite you to join me on a fun-packed journey into the mystery of symbology puzzles. and I would like to invite you to join me on a fun-packed journey into the mystery of symbology puzzles.

0:56Skip to 0 minutes and 56 seconds Together, you and I will learn how to decipher and crack some very unusual math codes, from ancient Egyptian number hieroglyphs to modern day bar codes and from Roman numerals to operator puzzles We will take a good look at solving cryptarithms - coded math problems where each digit is encoded by a different letter and we’ll even solve some very odd problems where really next to nothing is known By the end of the course, you’ll have significantly upgraded your problem-solving skills, gained knowledge and insight into the history, art and methodology of solving encrypted math problems and exercised your brain with a lot of fun challenges. Oh - I nearly forgot - we have a quest. To solve this!

1:36Skip to 1 minute and 36 secondsA puzzle sent to us by highly intelligent beings from outer space. What are they trying to tell us? We’ll need to use all the brainpower generated throughout the course in order to solve this… Are you in for the challenge?

What topics will you&nbspcover?

Encoding maths puzzles, secret codes and symbologies

Solving and creating cryptarithms - puzzles where numbers in a mathematical expressions are encoded

If you’re taking a course for free you have access to the course for its duration + 14 days, regardless of when you join. If you upgrade the course you have access for as long as the course exists on FutureLearn.